Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  Cuddy shook his head. “It ain’t my joke, General. It’s the Lord’s. If you think that’s kidding, you should have seen some of the fellows out there couldn’t make it down the hall to get to this recreation room. Let’s just leave it that your Mr. Iredell’s opinion is not going to be much use to Ken Moize in a court of law. Because law’s got no imagination.” Cuddy blew out another long sad sigh. “Humankind,” he said, “is breaking my heart.” Then he shuddered off the subject, and scooted his chair over to a paper package lying on one of his book crates. “Now, tell me, which one of these do you think? Which goes better with my suit?” He pulled out two ties. “I’m trying to improve my image so I can get Briggs junior to marry me. Women are always after you, and all I can figure is, it must be your clothes.”

  “They don’t marry me.”

  “Oh, they will when you mean it. Come on, which one?”

  The first of the ties looked like a summer lightning storm, and the other one had orange squares on it. I said, “Are you seriously asking me?” He nodded morosely. I took off my own tie and handed it to him. “This one,” I said. “Trust me.”

  “That’s what my ex—”

  “I know, I know.”

  So I went by myself and tieless through snow now crunchy as brown sugar to see Ratcher Phelps in East Hillston at the Melody Store. Up front a young woman was clerking, and back among his pianos, Mr. Phelps sat in his black suit and black patent leather shoes and sheer black nylon socks. He was playing a banjo and talking a song to himself, as solemn as a family lawyer at the reading of a will. He kept on with it as I walked toward him: “If you need a good man, Why not try me?…” His long spoon-curved nails plinked a last sharp chord as I finished the verse for him in a soft whistle, my ears going pink as I heard myself doing it. He said, “Hmmmm,” his moist doleful eyes quickly blearing over a look of wry interest. “You know that tune, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. ‘Big Feeling Blues,’ isn’t it? I have it on a Ma Rainey record, with Papa Charlie Jackson playing banjo.”

  “Hmmmm.” He placed the glittering instrument carefully on top of the spinet behind him and gave a slide of his hand to his hair. The hair was a flat black color that looked dyed and straightened; he combed it with a deep side-part. “You like the blues?” he asked me. I nodded. He nodded back. He said, “I have it in my remembrance that a piano,” he skipped his hand, a diamond ring twinkling, over the spinet’s keyboard, “that a piano is your particular favorite. Who do you like on blues piano?”

  I told him, “I like Fletcher Henderson. Lovie Austin. Professor Longhair. I like this lady Billie Pierce a lot. I like mostly old blues.”

  He nodded in a stately way and repeated his oleaginous “Hmmmm,” and then we rested with that.

  “Well, Mr. Phelps,” I began, “on the phone this morning you mentioned wishing to discuss this matter of reciprocity with me. Here I am.” I sat down on a piano bench across from his.

  Wetting his lips and pursing them a few times for practice, he said, “Young man, I have deliberated in my mind, and I have gone to my heart and asked it. And I believe that your,” he paused, searching among the spinets for a word, “your misimpression about my business, which is the business you see here before you, and not the jewelry business, was a misimpression.”

  I smiled, nodding. “Mr. Phelps, I am here as a music lover. And I am here alone. And anything you may kindly choose to say will be held in the uttermost confidentiality. I give you my word.”

  He accepted it with five slow nods. “Let us then,” he said, the voice warming, “let us then take a supposing. Suppose on that constitutional walk I believe I told you I have the habit of taking?”

  “Yes?”

  “Suppose those particular articles I believe you told me you were looking for, suppose they came to my notice, and the individual which they did not belong to also came to my notice? Now, in such a supposing as that, what would be interesting to know is if you people have any remuneration in mind for the recovery of those lost articles…throwing in that unnamed individual for no charge?”

  I gave him a very serious frown. “Mr. Phelps, Mr. Phelps. I thought we had already settled on your remuneration—when we came to our agreement on the matter of your nephew Billy, and his upcoming trial. Here you are raising the rent.”

  Like a minister of an old Ming dynasty, he stood up, small, portly, and sedate. “Billy,” he said, “is my sister’s baby. That poor widow grieves over her boy, and I in my heart at night in bed, I grieve over her, and a little extra re…muneration would go far to help ease her trials, and rent. That lost property is valuable property. According to you white people that lost it, now. I wouldn’t know. Worth more than all you see before you.”

  I stood up too, and we studied each other. Meanwhile, at the front of the store, a fattish child with idolatrous eyes spluttered notes out of the brassy, bright trumpet the clerk had taken down for him; his mother watched, pleasure and distress both in her face.

  Finally, I asked Ratcher Phelps if he had the stolen jewelry and coins with him. He said this was a music store. I asked him if he knew where the goods were, and who had them. He asked me to find out what the reward would be if he answered that question, and then ask it again. He offered me another of his suppositions: it would be astute of me to hypothesize that the more quickly I returned with an agreeable figure, the more likely I was to be present at an upcoming rendezvous between Mr. Phelps and the unnamed seller of the Dollard property. I was to suppose that Unnamed had contacted Phelps out of an urgent need for immediate cash.

  I asked, “Are we talking about a Mr. Luster Hudson?”

  Phelps rubbed his topaz cuff link, big as a cat’s eye, on the black sleeve of his other arm.

  “Ron Willis?” I asked.

  “Young man,” said Ratcher Phelps, “we are talking about Ma Rainey and Billie Pierce.” He picked up his banjo, cradling it across his dapper pouch. “And,” he added, leading me to the front of the store, “up here let me call to your attention a book of Fats Waller’s melodies that I am partial to, and I believe you would find them interesting to undertake.”

  With a hand on his shoulder, I stopped him. “Mr. Phelps, now, let’s spell this out, all right? I get this money for you, and you’ve got to promise me I’m going to be there looking on when those coins are turned over to you.”

  His perfectly specious smile rippled over the deep black jowls. “Oh, young friend,” he said. “Let’s just play the tune. Let’s not sing out all the words.”

  Chapter 22

  I don’t like hospitals. My father liked the clarity of urgency there. I don’t like the sterile smell, the sealed windows, the sharp quality of light and life insisted on. When I was a child, University Hospital meant to me the big square building that wanted my father to be in it most of his time, and that would call him away loudly out of his sleep, insisting that he return. As this building was also the ogre-haunted, inexplicable maze into which, from time to time, elderly relatives of mine would walk, never to come out again, simply to vanish from my life, I was always terrified that my father, too, would be snapped up by whatever monster crouched hungry behind some turn of the endless halls. He, a surgeon, always joked that no doctor and no nurse of his acquaintance would be caught dead staying in University Hospital as a patient; they knew too much to risk it. “Good Christ, Peggy,” he’d say, “whatever happens, just keep me at home in bed and let me sniff chicken soup.” But, of course, the ambulance that sludged through snow to the foot of Catawba Drive where I sat in the smashed car, holding my father, blood from my mouth sliding onto his unconscious face, that ambulance rushed him straight to University Hospital, where they are supposed to know how to make the bad things stop happening. And after six months more, he was caught dying there; while west in the mountains, in a hospital of recreation rooms, I was caught alive.

  Rowell Dollard had once come to visit me in the mountains to tell me I was killing my father and was killing myself. Toda
y I was coming to University Hospital to visit him, and hear him try to convince me he was not a murderer too.

  Outside Rowell’s door, Officer Wes Pendergraph sat reading Sports Illustrated. Inside, on the angled pillows, the silver hair gleamed as if it really were indestructible metal not subject to the dissolution of color and flesh that had in two days withered my uncle’s face. The face, gazing out the flat window, did not turn until I said, “Rowell.”

  “Justin. Well.” His eyes moved toward me; in them, anger too weak for his customary passion. “Your mother telephoned me from Alexandria.”

  “Yes, I spoke with her too.”

  “What did she say to you?” Rowell asked.

  I didn’t say she’d called crying and bewildered; how could Joanna be dead, Rowell be her murderer, me be his accuser? And crying, asked, had my suspension from work been brought on by a relapse into an alcoholic craziness? I told her only that it had not, and that other than so saying, I would not discuss with her the investigation of Rowell Dollard. “He’s family, Jay,” Mother had kept repeating. I said to Rowell now, “She is naturally distressed. She wants to come back to Hillston, but she has to stay with the children until Vaughn and Jennifer return from Antigua. She asked me to send flowers to Joanna’s services.” Actually, by Joanna Cadmean’s will, there were to be no services, merely private cremation. Old Briggs was apparently making the arrangements.

  “Will you sit down, please? I can’t see you.” Rowell’s voice, once so heartily senatorial, was now faltering.

  “All right.” I pulled over the vinyl chair. “How are you feeling?”

  “They’ve brought my blood pressure down. But there’s an embolism lodged in my lung.”

  “Yes, I was told. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not supposed to laugh too hard and send it to my brain. That is, under the circumstances, hardly likely… You’ve been taken off the investigation.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would still like to talk with you about it”

  “As you say, the matter is out of my hands. If your lawyers think you should talk to anyone, talk to Ken Moize.”

  Dollard inched up farther on the pillows. “I said I want to talk to you.”

  “All right.”

  “I did not kill Cloris! I cannot believe that you could have thought I did.”

  I looked at him a long time, then I said, “I owe you an apology for having believed otherwise.”

  Dollard let his breath out abruptly, as if startled to realize his lungs were filled.

  I added, “But it is Mrs. Cadmean’s murder the prosecutors are taking before the grand jury Monday.”

  “I am not guilty of that, either. She died exactly as I told you.”

  “Would you believe it if you were still solicitor! Does it look like suicide to you?”

  “No.” His protuberant eyes fixed on mine. “No. It looks like murder. It was murder. Her own.”

  “Her own?”

  His head raised from the pillow, his neck veinous. “Yes! Listen to me. Joanna murdered herself…so that I would be convicted.”

  “Jesus, Rowell! That’s preposterous.”

  “Is it? I’ve lain here thinking about everything, and I know it’s so.” His voice quickened, and he stopped himself, then began again slowly. “She must have been planning it for years. She planned it perfectly.”

  His eyes closed shut but moved restlessly beneath the lids as he went on in the strange thin voice. “You, Justin, were the perfect one to use. The perfect one to go to first.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  His head lay motionless on the pillow, the eyes shut. “You are a sympathetic person. And an imaginative one. You are too young to know many of the circumstances of the past, but close enough to care. You are a relative of mine. And you don’t like me.”

  Neither of us spoke. Outside, the clouds filled with a rusted rose color, and day’s light slipped lower in the room. From the hall filtered to us the rumbling screak of tray carts.

  Then Dollard spoke again, his voice still as the time. “Joanna hated me. She never forgave me for breaking off with her. It was…unacceptable to her. After I ended it, while she was still at the university, she called me…continually, at all hours, pleading, threatening. She was obsessed. One time, she demanded I come to her dormitory room or she would cut her wrists. I refused, I didn’t believe her. I was wrong. I found out she had nearly died—would have died, if her roommate had not returned unexpectedly from home. She has done this before, Justin. Don’t you see?” He stopped, pacing his breaths with concentrated effort, while outside the red darkened.

  I stood by the sealed window to watch night come on. I said, “You are telling me Mrs. Cadmean plotted her suicide to make it look as if you had murdered her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She took the phone from the hook, she broke the door chain in the study, she tore off her own watch?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your scarf, in her hand?”

  “She must have picked it up in the hall. I didn’t notice. I was terribly upset, Justin! God! She led me up to the study. Do you think if she had been trying to get away from me—on crutches!—I couldn’t have caught her?”

  “She could have been already upstairs. You could have forced her upstairs.”

  His eyes stared at me but were seeing back to that night. “She stood there, and smiled. And said, ‘This time I am leaving you. And this time you will suffer.’ And then…she jumped.”

  “Again, Rowell, we’re back to, why were you there? She did not call your house on the nineteenth. That’s a fact.”

  His forefinger knuckle rubbed against his lips. “No, she didn’t. I had phoned her earlier myself; I admit that. I was furious that she had been in my home. That she’d manipulated you into bringing her there. It was then she told me if I didn’t come over that night…She threatened me.”

  I looked around at him. “With what? That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  He pushed the knuckle hard into his upper lip.

  I said, “Rowell, you read the letter Mrs. Cadmean wrote me.”

  “Lies! Incredible lies. That’s when I knew how long she had planned this…monstrous…” His voice faded.

  “You know we have checked, and she did come to Hillston last summer, and there is a record of a call from your number to hers on St., Simons Island at the time she said Cloris called.”

  “For God’s sake, can’t you understand?! I called her, to demand that she stop her vile accusations to Cloris. She would never let me go.” Rowell’s voice itself sounded penned by a furious frustration. “When she married Charles Cadmean, I thought that would be the end of it, but, no, the letters…demented letters, Justin…kept coming. Years later, after Cloris and I married, they still kept coming. This has gone on half my life! I don’t mean all the time. But she besieged us. It was maddening. We never knew when. Years even could go by. We would forget. Then late at night, the phone would ring and it would be her again. That voice! You have no idea… Upsetting Cloris dreadfully. Telling Cloris how she’d been made to suffer. Telling her I had—,” he pressed his hand against his forehead.

  I said quietly, “Had killed Bainton Ames?” He said nothing. “We know you were at the inn the night Bainton died. Why did you take his coin? Good Christ, Rowell, why did you keep it?!”

  Straining, Dollard pulled himself upright on the bed. “Justin, Joanna put that coin there in Cloris’s closet two days ago. She must have. That’s why she made you bring her to my house. She was upstairs alone, wasn’t she?”

  I sat back down. “And where is she supposed to have gotten it?”

  “It’s a duplicate.”

  “No, it’s genuine.”

  “For God’s sake, Bainton’s was not the only one of that series, was it?! There must be dozens of them. You have to find out where she bought it. Can’t you see how long this woman has been plotting to ruin me? She wants to kill me!”

  I said, “She’s the
one who’s dead, Rowell. That’s a rather extreme form of revenge.”

  “I tell you, she was psychotic!”

  I shook my head. “Everything you tell me, especially if true, especially if she did hate you this bitterly, all the more reason for you to get rid of her.”

  “She killed herself. Justin, Justin, please. She actually believed that I would come back to her! When she spoke to me at Cloris’s grave, she actually believed that now I would come back to her. She had waited. I told her she was out of her mind. She killed herself.”

  Behind us the door whooshed silently open and a young doctor, an East Indian with deep, placid eyes, entered the room. “Sir,” he said in a purr, “I must say to go. Senator Dollard must be staying undisturbed.” With long, attenuated fingers he lifted Rowell’s wrist to take his pulse. I told the doctor I was just leaving. “Good, then,” he murmured.

  Passive and quiet in the hands of the hospital, Rowell looked up at me. He said, “Will you help me, Jay? She plotted against you, too.”

  I said, “Do you have any of these demented letters she’s supposed to have written you?”

  He shook his head angrily. “Of course not. I tore them up. Why should I keep them!” He saw that I did not believe him, and closed his eyes.

  At the door, I asked, “One thing, Rowell. Excuse me, Doctor. Would you be willing to give any monetary reward for the recovery of Cloris’s jewelry, and the coin collection?”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “I’m in contact with someone who thinks he can buy them.”

  “Is this coming from you on your own? Or from the department?” Rowell’s voice was rising again, and the doctor held up an admonishing hand at me.

  I said the department had no knowledge at this point of my informant.

  “Send him here to me.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  He brushed his hand irritably at the doctor, who was trying to wrap a blood pressure band around his arm. Then he muttered, “Five thousand dollars. If he’ll bring those things directly back here to me. They’re mine.”